1. Introduction
Climate change is defined as one of the most important risks threatening life on Earth, and is a major impediment to economic and social development [
1,
2]. Since climate change is highly correlated with the greenhouse gas emissions from energy production that is vital for economic and social development, it presents the “greatest challenge of our time”; staying within planetary boundaries while pursuing long-term social and economic development [
3]. This challenge is greater for developing economies (See the special issue on Development Under Climate Change of Review of Development Economics, 16(3), 2012, for a comprehensive analysis and the recent discussions at the United Nations’ Economic and Financial Committee on the unprecedented impacts of climate change disproportionately burdening developing countries available at
https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gaef3516.doc.htm).
On the regulatory front, the preferred approach has also shifted towards incentivising and mobilising private actors and market mechanisms. In May 2018, the European Commission [
5] presented a package of measures as a follow-up to its action plan on financing sustainable growth. The package focuses predominantly on capital markets in order to support the better allocation of financial capital to companies and projects that are sustainable. A key instrument proposed in the action plan is regulatory disclosure of environmental, social and governance risks by companies as well as charging institutional investors with the fiduciary duty of taking this information into consideration in investment decisions. The Commission specifically mentions “fostering sustainable corporate governance”, with no further elaboration on what this actually means and how it is related to climate change. While certain corporate disclosures related to climate change may be mandatory in some countries to help the allocation of capital to more sustainable companies, discretionary reporting has become an important matter of governance. Climate change poses physical (operational), financial and reputational risks for companies. Detecting climate change-related risks, developing strategies to manage them and disclosing those risks and risk management strategies are an essential part of boards’ fiduciary duties (See G20-OECD Corporate Governance Principles at
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/g20-oecd-principles-of-corporate-governance-2015_9789264236882-en).
In this context, companies are exposed to stakeholder pressures to disclose their carbon emissions and climate change strategies, while institutional investors are also under pressure by asset owners, especially by pension funds, to adopt better stewardship policies and take into account the materiality of climate change risks when making investment decisions [
6,
7]. In response to these pressures, the number of companies that voluntarily disclose climate change information beyond the regulatory requirements has been increasing. Our research addresses the Commission’s shortcomings by investigating the role of boards’ gender diversity as a board attribute that may have an impact on voluntary climate change disclosure channelled through the better functioning of boards’ audit and risk management committees. These committees are mandatory in most jurisdictions. Our inquiry is more relevant for developing economies, where governments are concerned about the conflicts between growth and climate change regulations and are therefore reluctant to introduce climate change reforms [
8].
Companies are disclosing climate change information through general-purpose corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability reports, and increasingly through the CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project)—a charity founded in London in 2000 with the backing of international institutional investors. Each year, the CDP invites the largest listed companies around the world on behalf of signatory investors to disclose their carbon emissions and detail how they manage the risks and opportunities that stem from climate change. As of 2018, the number of companies that disclosed climate change information in response to the CDP’s invitation was over 7000, representing 56% of the total global market cap (See CDP’s website for data at
https://www.cdp.net/en/data). Some rating agencies that provide environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings to institutional investors and index builders use CDP data in their own assessments. The failure of regulatory approaches to mitigate climate change makes it important to understand the drivers for companies to disclose climate change information that may have implications on sustainable investing.
In the corporate governance literature, board composition—predominantly board independence—is commonly used as a variable that can positively impact disclosure and transparency, quality of risk management and long-term perspectives on value creation, on the basis that independent directors are more concerned about their reputation. This argument is challenged by the fact that in countries where companies are controlled, independent director markets are inefficient, and boards are less effective. We refer the reader to Bebchuk and Hamdani [
8] for a critical perspective on the identification challenges for board independence in developing and emerging economies.
A growing stream of governance research focuses on the implications of boards’ gender diversity. A review of this literature concludes that improving women’s access to boards is often but not always associated with financial performance [
9], although evidence that the presence of women on boards improves environmental, social and ethical aspects of firm behaviour is more equivocal [
10]. Recent papers focused on emerging economies suggests that the effect of gender diversity in boards is highly contingent upon the power dynamics in the board and the cultural context [
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18]
Ensuring women’s full and effective participation at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life is a key element of the 2030 Development Agenda, but the predicted significance of such participation on climate change and sustainability is neither articulated nor explored in policy debate. Recently, some empirical studies specifically investigated the effect of boards’ gender diversity on sustainability and climate change reporting [
11,
12,
13,
14,
19,
20]. These studies used different specifications to measure diversity and are unequivocal about the implications of boards’ gender diversity on sustainability and climate change disclosure. We argue that the mixed results may be related to differences between the impact of different categories of female directors. Female directors may be ineffective for a number of reasons. First, they may be sitting in the boards because they are members of the controlling families, not because they are qualified. They may also represent token appointments or be perceived as tokens by others which makes them ineffective. Women may also be marginalized and therefore be less vocal, especially if the boards are dominated by controlling shareholders who ultimately elect the directors.
In this study, we investigate whether the effective involvement of women in board governance can partly compensate for weak climate change disclosure regulations and/or weak enforcement in order to provide input on the discussions about board reforms in emerging economies. Specifically, we examine the impact of gender diversity in board committees on climate change-related disclosures, as directors on committees are better positioned to influence board governance. By focusing on the relationship between climate change disclosure and the presence of women in audit and governance committees in an emerging economy, we contribute to the scarce and unequivocal literature with an in-depth look at women on boards.
Our results show that the inclusion of women in boards matters. However, as expected, it is not the mere presence of women in boards, regardless of their typology, nor the diversity, but instead women’s active involvement in the governance of the company, proxied by their participation in governance and audit committees, that predicts climate change disclosure. We discuss these results in the light of the governance regularities in Turkey, where boards are largely ineffective and controlled. Our findings lend support to a more holistic approach to climate change disclosure and board reform in emerging economies.
The rest of the paper unfolds as follows:
Section 2 reviews the relevant literature on the gender diversity of corporate boards,
Section 3 introduces the context, the sample and the estimation methods employed for the analysis,
Section 4 presents the results and
Section 5 concludes.
5. Conclusions and Implications for Reforms
This paper investigates the potential impact of board composition on corporate disclosure of climate change-related information. Our inquiry relies on the global CDP initiative, backed up by institutional investors around the world, and the CDP database of corporate climate change disclosures. The study makes use of hand collected data of a sample of the largest Turkish companies over the period 2010–2019. The institutional context of our investigation makes our results relevant for countries with weak environmental regulations, a high gender gap, high ownership concentration and ineffective boards dominated by controlling shareholders. The results suggest that the main driver of climate change disclosure in Turkey for the period between 2010 and 2019 is internal governance exercised by the boards, not the regulations. Overall, the results show that board independence is a significant predictor of climate change disclosure, but the effect of female independent directors is insignificant and inconsistent, thus, the presence of women on boards doesn’t have any predictive power on climate change disclosure. We report, however, reasonable evidence for the positive impact of independent female directors on voluntary climate change disclosure. Given the fact that almost half of the women on corporate boards in Turkey are affiliated with the owner families in Turkey, these results confirm that not all female directors are the same. The presence of female directors predicts voluntary disclosure of climate change information when they are professionally qualified and when they are given the opportunity to influence the governance of the firm. This opportunity takes the form of board committee membership in the case of Turkey.
Our results are of interest to regulators and policy makers. Gender diversity in boards has become a criterion for investment analysis and inclusion in indices (See, for example, FTSE All-Share® Women on Boards Leadership Index and Russell 1000® Women on Boards Leadership Index calculated by London Stock Exchange Group. Methodologies developed by rating agencies to use in scoring companies’ ESG performance include board gender diversity as a criterion. See Vigeo-EIRIS (
http://vigeo-eiris.com/) and Sustainalytics (
https://www.sustainalytics.com/) as examples.) that aim to capture sustainability indicators [
37]. Although the argument for the inclusion of women is supported by moral concerns about discrimination, stemming from the incongruence of the percentage of women in the labour force and percentage of women in decision making bodies including boards, studies, including this study, show that a closer look at board dynamics is necessary in formulating board reforms if the purpose goes beyond moral imperatives, which takes into consideration the ownership structures and the cultural norms. Our results support the argument for board reforms that encourage board independence, board gender diversity and nomination processes that can mitigate gender biases.